SurveyAnalytics offers one of the most sophisticated Randomization mechanisms in the Online Survey Application industry for minimizing Question Order Effects. Depending upon your requirements a variety of Randomization features and techniques are used. In this tutorial different techniques and methods of Randomization will be illustrated with examples.

Problem Statement: I want to randomly choose one question from my survey and display it to the user. Further more , I want to divide my survey into three(or any number) of sections and choose one question from each section and display it to my respondents.

Solution :

1. Create all the different questions. You do not need to worry about ordering the questions since only one of them will be randomly picked.
2. Then goto the ${SurveyAdministration} tab.
3. Look toward the Randomization Options down to-wards the lower right portion of the screen.
4. Enable the Randomly Select One Question Option.
5. This will Instruct the Engine to randomly choose one question out of the survey and display it
6. Now to divide the Survey into 3 (Or more sections).
7. On the ${EditSurvey} tab scroll down to the Last Question of each of the sections and add a Page Break there. A Page Break is nothing buy a Branch to the next question.
8. You can add a page break by clicking on the Icon on the Question.

Problem Statement: I want to randomize the order in which the questions get displayed. I have an initial welcome question and then three sets of questions (each with N questions) -- I would like so that the order in which each of the question sets that get displayed is random.
However the order in which the Question Sets get displayed have to one after the other.

Solution :

1. Create all the Questions that you would need.
3. Make sure that your initial welcome questions is the first question in the Survey
5. Create Page Breaks on the following locations: -
   • First Question
   • Last Question of the first question set
   • Last Question of the second question set and so on ...
   • Then goto the ${SurveyAdministration} tab.
   • Look toward the Randomization Options down toward the lower right portion of the screen.
   • Enable the Randomize All Questions In the Survey Option.
   • This will enable Randomization in each "Section" -- A Section is defined as a list of questions between two branch points
   • If you need a "Thank You Text Question" at the End of the survey create a Single question at the end after the last question set.
   • Make sure you enable a Page Break after the last question in the question set to the "Thank You " question or else your "Thank You" question will also be included in the randomization and might not be in the End.

Problem Statement: Now let take this to the next level and impose one more restriction on the above two problem statements. In both cases we had 3 Question Sets that we either choose (1 of N) or we randomized the questions order. Now we want to randomly pick only one of these question blocs and display it to the respondent.

Solution :

1. Here is where we introduce the Randomizer Question Type
2. Go ahead and create the survey and setup the randomization as described in Problem 1 or Problem 2 which ever is you case
3. Please have a "Text Only" Question before each question bloc (Maybe explaining what the next question bloc is all about )
4. After this is done click on the "Add Randomizer" link under the "Add Question" button on the ${EditSurvey} tab.
5. Here choose the first questions of each of the question blocs. i.e. the Text-Only questions that you added at the head of each of the question blocs
7. You should have (in our case) three items to randomize here -- The first questions of each of the three question blocs
8. After that close the Randomizer window
9. Now you should see a new "Randomizer" question added to your survey.
10. Make sure that the Randomizer is before the questions it randomizes.
11. If you added the questions into the randomizer in ascending order then it's location is automatically set to be before the first question it randomizes.
12. Now go ahead and create a Page Break on the "Text Only" question to branch to the next question. This will enable the Engine to Jump to the question and then Randomize the Bloc.
13. You are done !